Welcome to Fiction Forge Indy! We are a group of four writers in Indianapolis that love to talk about anything that has to do with writing. We all met at the Indiana Writers Center and come from four very different backgrounds with interests in Fantasy, Mystery, Humor, Romance, and Historical Fiction. Prepare to be informed and entertained! Oh --and by the way, we hope you share your thoughts on the craft of writing, too.

Sunday, June 10, 2018

An Evening with Jason Pell Learning about Kickstarter and Pinpricks

I was in Charlotte, West Virginia two weeks ago and had the pleasure of meeting Jason Pell. He is a young writer who sat down with me for nearly an hour to talk about writing.

He told me about Kickstarter and Pinpricks. Let's start with Kickstarter.

Kickstarter is an amazing company and website. I had not heard of this company before, but I'm going to toss in my two pennies about this. Overview: this company has a team of marketers and businesspeople who work to raise funds for a wild variety of projects. Jason talked about using Kickstarter for his projects, and for his most recent project, Pinpricks, he raised over $10,000 to get the project going.

Kickstarter is not a publishing company, but they set up goals, pledge levels, and timelines. After the goal for funding is reached, the artist pledges the art to the funders within a set time.

Personally, I was super excited about this, but I see some serious drawbacks to trying this as a novelist/writer. Jason Pell is using Kickstarter to support the graphic novels he needs to print, but also Kickstarter seems like an incredible method to start marketing and gain web hits for your project.

Kickstarter can set up music projects and art projects, certainly, but I'm not certain that this can work the same for writing a book. Yes, I could probably set up a Kickstarter to write a novel, including a budget for research, time, and whatever else, but really, writing a novel doesn't cost much outside of time.

Moving on to Pinpricks. A Book of Tiny and Terribly Oddities by Jason Pell.

This is Jason Pell's fourth project on Kickstarter, and he has done all the artwork for this project:

Listening to Jason talk about this project, I was looking forward to buying a copy and reviewing this (on the blog). The artwork is awesome, and the brief synopsis I read describes 101 stories that, "range from scary, humorous, and sometimes, maybe too rarely, a little too hopeful."

Funny thing about Kickstarter is, from what I can tell, once the funding period is complete, I cannot give money or pre-order the material. I have to wait until September, I think, for Pinpricks to be available--perhaps on Amazon?

So I looked at other titles from Jason. He has some very interesting titles, but I decided not to go for zombies or suicide, and ordered Season's End, a gothic, horror-fantasy. This has original artwork done by Blake Wheeler (not Jason).

"Empty towns naturally tend to have a foreboding presence. Gravity's tendrils hold too firmly and motes of memory interfused with dust lost capaciously in the air giving only a shadowed ghost of what was before. Vanbille had all the unpleasantness of any other abandoned village, but also something more" (55).

One thing Jason said is that writers often do not support each other. This is more true than not. I am sorry to say that I am often not supportive of other writers. I am very proud to have met and spoken with Jason, and the nuggets of gold in Season's End are fantastic.

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Heather McGrail

Heather

Heather spent much of her life in school, teaching, and traveling--generally investing lots of experiences about which to write. Now, she is settled into the quiet, Midwest with a boring office job to write about her experiences. Too bad her current experiences are great writing material, too!

Heather has been active in this blog and the Indiana Writers' Center for many years. Yeah for great writers and great support for writers in the community!

Mike Moir

Mike

Hi. My name is Michael Moir and I'm a writer.

I don't know when I became addicted to the printed word, but over time I have found that I can't put it away from me. My therapist says it has to do with the little yellow books that were forced upon me in Kindergarten (See Spot Run...Run, Spot, Run! RUN!!!), but in the depth of my soul, I know it is deeper than that. I was born with this in my very DNA. Phrasing, grammar, and plot structure are as sure in my being as cytosine is to guanine. It is a dark and wildly fantastic creature that gires and gimbles in the shadowed places of my soul. I have been told that I must find a way to purge the wordful animal within (my therapist recommended me to a witch doctor in the Andes), but I have decided to learn to live with it. This desire, this compulsion, this demon that is writing is me and I am it.

I call him Steve.

Randall Scott Wireman

Randy

Hi! I am Randy. I'm pretty sure that I started writing when I held my first crayola. Unfortunately, I grabbed the white one which left little proof of my brilliant earlier works! I write fiction that's often centered on gay characters - but sometimes off-centered gay characters, too -Ha! Because of the poor recording or admittance of such affairs due to prevailing political and religious views, such historical possibilities of gay relations are difficult to accept, let alone imagine. But, of course gay relations occurred, and much more often than the historical records dictate. I like to give honor to my gay brothers and sisters of our hushed past by conjuring such situation backdrops of history and breathing life into what I cannot know really occurred, but what I feel is closer to reality than it is to fiction.

Nick Dyakanoff

Nick

Nick Dyakanoff recently started writing and exploring the world of workshops and blogs with our strange group. He tells lots of amazing stories from growing up in Alaska, working on different ships, exploring the music industry, and settling into Midwestern life.

Writing has become a new way to share these stories. He looks forward to sharing more of his stories on this blog.